A small child sat on the library floor. She had sea-foam colored hair with a single ivory stripe, which tapered until it reached her shoulders. She wore casual clothing: some blue jeans and a white T-shirt, accompanied by a pair of red and white sneakers. Her goldenrod eyes were fixated on a large leather-covered book in her hands. It was titled The Incomplete Biography of Star Swirl the Bearded. The author's name was spelled in fine print on the bottom of the cover. "By T. Sparkle," she murmured. Her face filled with curiosity. "What's a biography doing in the mythology section?" she asked to nobody in particular. Opening the tome to the first page, she began to read. "Star Swirled the Bearded was undoubtedly one of the most influential unicorns of the pre-classical era. He invented many spells and was greatly involved in several significant events in Equestrian history," she paused, "Equestrian history? Pre-classical era? Spells? What the heck?". She kept reading, eagerly seeking for answers to her questions.
The child's father worked at a library, and she would stay there after school until her father was finished with his work. She often found herself in the mythology section; she was fascinated by all of the creatures and stories the subject had to offer. This was the first time she had been so engrossed in a book, however. When she looked up to check the time, she had already finished one fourth of the book and the clock on the library wall read 7:00 PM. She noticed her father approaching her and buried her sight back into a page of the book.
The girl's father sat down next to her, smiling. "What'cha reading this time, Lyra?" he asked. He knew Lyra liked reading, especially about mythology. But he never saw her get this far in a book in one day. Actually, he never saw her get this far in a book ever.
Lyra looked up at her father again and spoke with enthusiasm. "It's a book about Star Swirl the Bearded. It says he was a unicorn who lived in a land called 'Equestria'. He wrote lots of spells and was dubbed the 'most magically inclined unicorn of the pre-classical era'," she said. She waited for a response.
Her father's face turned from a smile to a look of concern. He sighed, "You aren't actually taking that book seriously, are you?" He hoped not. The last thing he wanted was a loony six year old daughter. He had never heard of Star Swirl the Bearded in his entire life.
"N-No, not at all!" Lyra stuttered and looked away. She was lying. She believed every word of that book. She was not sure why, but the way it was written just made it feel it was true. She knew she couldn’t prove the book was right. She wanted to go home and never talk about this with her father again. She decided to change the topic. "Are we going home now?" Lyra asked.
Her father simply nodded.
Lyra returned the book to its spot on the shelves and followed after her father. Even after she put the book down, though, she couldn't stop thinking about it. She was sad she had to put it down. How did magic work? She wondered. She wondered how life was like for a pony in Equestria, especially for unicorns. Questions stuck to her mind and the desire to read more about the strange world and its inhabitants flourished.
Together with her father, Lyra walked out of the library and into the autumn air. She was excited for tomorrow evening.
Chapter 1: It's nothing much, but at least it's something.
It had been ten years since Lyra first encountered that book. She had been rigorously studying Equestria ever since then. Resources were limited, but she always managed to find something on the shelves of the town library. Over the years, she found two more authors who wrote about Equestria and its wonders. None of them evoked the same wonder T. Sparkle's work did, but their works were still equally fascinating to her. She noticed that each author tended to focus on specific subjects. T. Sparkle focused mainly around unicorns and their history, but wrote about other topics as well. Red Heart's writing focused greatly on anatomy and medicine. The third author, F. Shy, only wrote one book that she knew of. It focused on creatures of all kinds; large, small; friendly, hostile; mysterious and not mysterious at all. That book had been especially interesting to Lyra because it had many parallels to myths she had already read about.
Whenever Lyra found a new book about Equestria she would pull it off its shelf, read some of it, and then inevitably buy it. Because of this, she knew the only books the Mythology section possessed written by T. Sparkle, Red Heart, or F. Shy were new.
Lyra checked the Mythology section once again. She had read the majority of the books there and was looking for an interesting read. As her eyes scanned the shelves, a familiar name popped out at her among the others. She shivered in anticipation. Her heart raced. Her mouth was instantly dry when she saw the familiar leather binding and bright gold lettering. Her face beamed when she saw the name of her favorite author. Lyra reached up and wrapped her fingers around the book and took it off the bookcase. Sitting down in the passageway of the section, she took a long look at the cover of An Introduction to Magic.
When Lyra had finished the first part of the book, she closed its leather bound cover. She approached the front desk. A tall, blond haired man sat behind the desk beside a computer monitor, his attention focused on his own book. She rolled her eyes and tapped the small bell behind the monitor. A short, soothing ring of brass filled the room, causing the man in front of her to jerk.
The receptionist looked up from his read, directing his attention to Lyra. His blue and brown eyes sparkled and his lips lifted into a welcoming grin when he saw her. “Hello Lyra. What may I help you with?” he asked, before glancing down at the book in her arm, “Ah, another book about magical equines I presume? Here, let me get that for you.”
Lyra simply nodded, placing her newly found book on the counter. The man lifted a gray code scanner to the book before noticing that once again, there was no bar code on the book. He checked the library database. According to the database, the library owned no copies of An Introduction to Magic, neither did it own any copies in the past. The man shrugged lightly and raised a thumb. It was normal for Lyra to check out books with no previous trace of existence.
Lyra stuffed the tome into her bag and walked towards the front doors.
“Bring it back in two weeks,” the receptionist said, sliding a hand out of the sleeves of his lab coat to wave goodbye to Lyra.
Stepping out into the cold air of October, Lyra began her long and agonizing saturday walk home. A bombardment of droplets hit her face, some hitting her eyeballs, blurring her vision. She should have brought her raincoat.
From underneath a balcony, a freezing cold, soaking wet Lyra knocked on the hard wooden door of the house. It was a moment or two before the door opened slightly, revealing Lyra’s taller cousin. She had brown irises, short cut, dirty-blonde hair, and monotonously pasty skin. She was in her bland, grey pajamas. "Oh, it’s just you. Come on in," Ruby said, opening the entrance further and motioning with her hand for Lyra to come inside.
The place was an absolute mess. The air was dusty, dry, and uncomfortably warm. The furniture was tattered and worn out from years of use. Unorganized piles of trash and used clothing littered the floor, emitting the odor of rotten cheese.
Lyra had grown used to the untidiness of her own house, and Ruby’s own messiness by extension. But she could never get used to the smell that filled the entire building. Even worse, no matter how hard she tried, she could never get rid of it. She tried dish soap, scented candles, and even bleach. None of them had any effect. Lyra recalled how she squinted her eyes and her nose scrunched as she had to restrain the surge of projectile vomit every time she tried removing the offensive stench.
From the moment she stepped inside, Lyra winced and wrapped her fingers around her nostrils. Once again, the aggressive smell of the house invaded her nose and her vision was blurred for the second time that day. She desperately clung to her sanity and sprinted to back of the building; to the only place she could bring herself to admit she lived in.
Lyra’s hand gripped a round gold-tinted knob. It gave way. She flew inside the room. Afterward, she slammed the barrier behind her shut. She breathed a sigh when clean air filled her being, restoring her mind’s calmness. In contrast to the rest of Lyra’s home, her own room looked like it was from an entirely different universe. The carpet was clean and odorless, her shelves were organized, her desk was spotless, and her bed was made.
After retrieving her book, Lyra set her book bag aside and collapsed into the comforting embrace of the sheets and mattress. She once again sighed, this time into the covers of her bed as she opened her book, her nose filling with the soothing smell of paper. She begun to read, her mind gobbling up every written word like a large bowl of alphabet soup. Every paragraph was a slice of heaven, every sentence dragging her mind further into the strange world of pastel-colored equines. Her vision closed around the book, immersing herself in T. Sparkle’s writing and she lost any and all senses of time she once had. Before she knew it, the sun which once hung over her head and filled her room with light now hid itself behind the shadows of buildings and trees, turning the sky a bright mixture of orange, pink, and navy blue. Then the sky turned black.
Then the rest of the room turned black. A soft thud of hair against fabric could be heard throughout the closed space of Lyra's bedroom.
“So, as you can see, the differential of proper time is equal to the differential of time divided by the lorentz factor. This, in a sense, is similar to the time dilation equation I introduced earlier, except this works better in the case of an accelerating reference frame. If we integrate the differential of proper time from a to b…”
Lyra’s eyes roamed the room. She never really understood relativity (or calculus for that matter), and she never planned to. The subjects felt irrelevant to her. Because of this, she often fell into deep thought during Samuel’s lectures. It wasn’t that she didn’t respect him; no, she respected her blond-haired physics and mathematics teacher greatly. She just could never get her head around the “mathematical beauty” of his passions.
Her mind eventually ceased its focus on anything tangible, focusing far out into the distance. Once again, Lyra was lost to the world of tiny pastel horses. Before she knew it, a bell rang to signal the end of class and likewise her mental tangents. In response, the few students placed in Samuel’s course stood up. With their belongings in tow, they navigated to one of the two wooden doors leading to the main hallway of the building. Lyra, like a robot, imitated the mechanical movements of her fellow classmates and stepped outside the classroom.
The halls were filled with the clanging of lockers and the loud conversations and liquid-like movements of students and teachers alike. Lyra sighed; another day of high school was halfway over. It would only be another three and a half hours before she could return to the warming embrace of her bed and the book that awaited her. The thought put a smile on her face and a slight bounce in her step, and she traveled to the lunchroom eagerly, knowing the day would end and the night sky would reign supreme again.
Like in the hallways, the room was full of chatter. Smells of all kinds wafted through school cafeteria. It was Thursday, and there had always been a long standing tradition among the school of serving fried rice and chicken that day of the week. Lyra never really liked fried rice for some reason. She didn’t like rice in general, actually. Lucky for her, Ruby made her something for lunch today. She wouldn’t have to eat the repulsive food the cafeteria served on a daily basis.
Lyra sat down at a table and removed her lunch from her backpack. She looked at the sandwich in her hands, observing each crater in the sourdough bread before grinning wide and taking a bite. It tasted like wet cardboard. Even though Ruby worked four part-time jobs, genetically modified foods were all she could afford when piled on top of paying taxes and loans for the house. Lyra could not complain, though. Anything other than that rice was good enough for her.
As she took a second bite of her sandwich, Lyra saw a brown haired boy coming closer and closer to her table, until he was sitting in front of her. He was wearing a black T-shirt with the word “music” printed in a large, white font on the front, next to a red treble clef. Lyra nodded her head in respect and greeting to her older friend, making sure to maintain eye contact. He, in turn, grinned at her and, without words, waved his hand. He did not want to annoy Lyra, so he planned to avoid any form of small talk unless it was an absolute necessity.
The boy reached into one of his pockets. He held a plastic fork in one hand and had reached up with his other hand to pluck at the teeth of the utensil. Each tooth of the fork was a different length than the others, and when they were plucked they vibrated at different frequencies. Sticking out the tip of his tongue from behind his lips, he began to play a melody. Lyra raised an eyebrow in response to the bizarre tune her friend was playing. When he finished, she decided to raise something else.
“Toby, what were you playing?” Lyra asked. The song felt familiar to her, but she couldn’t quite place her finger on where she had heard it before. When she finally realized what it was, she blinked once and knowingly nodded.
Toby froze for a moment, then remembered he was supposed to say something. He glanced to the side before speaking.“I found it in a book in the music section of the library. It was in an unlabeled leather-bound journal. The pages looked pretty old. The song itself wasn’t named, just written down,” he said. He raised a hand up to his neck to briefly scratch it, then his reddened ears, before laying it in his empty lap.
Lyra looked into her friend’s amber eyes, a dull expression on her face. Then, the staring contest ended just as soon as it had started, and she returned to casually eating her sandwich. She could see through him similarly to how she could see through a freshly cleaned window. Toby was never good at lying, she thought. However, instead of making it known that he was indeed a terrible liar, she put the conversation down. She took a final bite of her sandwich and put her lunchbox back into her bag.
Just as Lyra was about to go to her next class, Samuel sat down next to Toby. Bad grades again? Damn it. Damn it all, she thought. Though nobody could hear her thoughts, they were clearly reflected in her facial expressions. Every single time her quirky physics teacher joined her at the lunch tables it was because she had bad grades in his classes. This time was different though; Samuel was not wearing that face this time. He wasn't wearing an expression of disappointment and mild annoyance. Rather, he wore a face Lyra was not well acquainted with.
“Hello Lyra,” Samuel spoke in a tone that made Lyra want to actually talk to him. That rarely ever happens with her; in fact it had only happened once before now. “I got my hands on one of T. Sparkle’s works. It’s called ‘Space and Hyperspace Travel: Everything Needed to Know About Spacetime, the 11th Dimension, and Advanced Teleportation Spells’,” he said. “I'll give it to you after I finish reading it.”
Once again, an eyebrow was lifted on Lyra’s face. She knew T. Sparkle tended to use long titles, but that was large for even a T. Sparkle book. But that was not what caught the majority of Lyra's attention. Instead, it was her teacher. In her mind Samuel was the least likely person to read any of T. Sparkle's writing.
She giggled. Then, she broke out into the sounds of a cackling hyena. She was suffocating from the thousands of assaults on her stomach that had slowly built up into an uncomfortable pain. Him of all people? Oh man that's rich!
Samuel’s face contorted into a look of confusion from the event which had just taken place in front of him. “What’s so funny?” he asked. He was trying to understand why Lyra was all of a sudden so open with her facial expressions. Usually she was a very reserved person. Did he really know his student as much as he thought he did?
“Oh nothing; just you’ve always insisted Sparkle’s work was fictional and didn’t interest you.”
“And I meant it. Primarily it is the topic itself that interests me...” He paused, took a breath, and continued. “Well, most of it anyways.”
“Whatever. Just don’t come to me saying it’s pseudoscientific or anything like that. I don’t read Sparkle’s work for its scientific contents. I read Sparkle’s work because I’m bored,” Lyra lied flatly. She believed Sparkle’s work to be genuine fact. The only problem for her was she could not prove it, so she didn't bother to formulate an argument for it.
“Don’t worry about that, Lyra. I’m not here to crush your dreams.”
“What dreams? You know what? Nevermind that; I have a class to go to.”
And with that said, Lyra got up from her seat, slipped her arms into the shoulder straps of her backpack, and walked to her next class alongside Toby. Finally, something that entertains me!
It was a pleasant monday in early January; the first day of third grade for Lyra. School had just ended, and her parents were walking her home. The sounds of cars, people talking, and the occasional street performer filled the streets of the town with an underlying rhythm of liveliness. It was on this day, however, that the typical streets were to become much less so for the eight year-old Lyra.
As they turned a corner, two very seemingly out-of-place figures came into view. The first of the two individuals looked like she was in her early 20s and looked incredibly casual; she wore a grey sweater-jacket and a pair of black tights which had been ripped near the knees and thighs, presumably on accident. On her nose nested a pair of purple-lensed sunglasses, which had black frames that created a contrast against the pasty, almost white skin of her face. The most noticeable trait, however, was that unlike all the other townsfolk, her hair was striped with aquamarine and electric blue.
The second of these individuals, left of the first one, who looked like she was in her late 20s, gave off the complete opposite air of her companion. She wore a simple, gray dress, which was very similar to the charcoal color of her hair. The only real color she wore was on the purple bowtie she had around her neck and the lavender in her own eyes. Most unexpectedly, this person was smiling just like her companion, either due to the cello in her arms, or the electric guitar playing of her partner.
At first, the two played what seemed to be just a simple melody. Then it got much more complex. In an instant, a cascade of notes from both the stringed instruments the two played was flowing through Lyra’s mind like a river of sound that filled her soul with glee, content, and wonder. It was then that Lyra came to a sudden truth.
I want to be like them.
What she didn’t know is that she had much more in common with the two than she ever expected.
It was, by definition, chaotic. The school auditorium boomed with the raucous sounds of students playing their musical instruments. Everything from a trumpet, to a piano, to a violin, to even a bongo and xylophone could be heard by those unfortunate enough -- like an unusually calm yet still energetic Lyra-- to be treated to such torture. She had laid her fingers on the strings of her beloved lyre, the only memorial of her mother she had after she seemingly disappeared alongside her husband. She plucked at the metallic strands, generating a light-hearted melody over the background noises of the room.
Lyra’s world soon blurred out of her mind, the grey walls of the auditorium covered in a veil of darkness and the sonic chaos replaced by a symphony of strings of many kinds that played in harmony with her own plucking. Then, slowly, her sight returned alongside her other senses. A gentle blue accented by wisps of white greeted her openly, and combined with the embrace of the cotton sheets, covered her in warmth.
Suddenly, the gentle sparkling and crackling of unicorn magic could be heard from over the musical symphony, and the clouds began to warp. A black void appeared in the sky. Then, once again, Lyra was plunged into near darkness, the only source of light being the sky behind her. Unlike last time, however, this darkness was ominous, cold, and remorseless. Her arms and legs and body were trembling, and goose bumps had covered every part of her body as she was wrapped in the icy cold. Then, the sky disappeared from sight. She became restless, and wished to be embraced by light once again. Her horn answered her request eagerly, sparking and cracking and whirring, and lighted up with a bright, warm halo of golden hues.
As the glow of her magic provided some leeway to see, Lyra noticed three other figures floating close by, but they were still unrecognizable to her, and so she directed her attention elsewhere; to the strange objects nearby.They were like nothing she had ever seen before. They were strange in shape; tangled messes of glowing, vibrating string. A moment passed, and then she was warmed by gentle, but still bright background radiation. Then another second passed, and the background radiation was replaced by enormous gas clouds and blinding, jagged arcs of blue, orange, yellow, and white. After a few more seconds, these things did too disappear, only to be replaced by a pink, diffusely textured ceiling.
As the symphony disappeared, Lyra’s eyes rapidly opened to be greeted with a tired, lackluster face and matted brown hair and empty eyes. She grinned sheepishly at her teacher and apologized, “Sorry, Mrs. Muse; must have closed my eyes again.”
Author's Note
Alright, finally another release!
Sorry I've been taking so long; I'm really caught up in a homework pickle right now (as I said in my blog), so productivity is a bit slow in the writing department.
Anyways, this chapter is a doozy.
